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Want to program a nervous system? Start off with a nematode

This article was taken from the March 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="REGULARSExchange-BodyCopyJustified">This wire-frame model is a cellular simulation of the 1mm-long Caenorhabditis elegans worm. Its body will wriggle to life, replicating the electrical activity of neurons, synapse and muscle cells, enabling neuroscientists to examine at close range how the nervous system functions and responds to physical forces. It's the work of OpenWorm, an online community project that's attempting to reverse-engineer C elegans. "We're building an open-source digital platform to simulate the activity of the nervous system and, ultimately, all the cells," says Stephen Larson, a computational neuroscience consultant based in San Diego, California, who launched OpenWorm in early 2011. If we want to recreate the human brain with computer models, he says, we have to start with simple organisms.

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<p style="text-align: left;" class="REGULARSExchange-BodyCopyJustified">With just 959 cells, including 302 neurons, the hermaphrodite gender of C elegans fits the bill. But creating algorithms to simulate the functions of even this number of cells is a big task for Larson, who is co-ordinating 16 scientists and programmers from the UK, Ireland, Russia and the US. Building on the C elegans connectome -- the first 3D wiring diagram of an animal brain, completed in the 80s -- the team has already produced Worm Browser, a soft-body model with every neuron and neural connection. Their next step is to connect it to the software that will drive the simulations. They hope to have a dynamic model on the web by the end of the year. "It's about understanding the brain as a machine by building models that reproduce what it does," says Larson.